Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday November 30, 2010 @02:38PM
from the silver-still-fine dept.

coondoggie writes "Copper thieves targeting Atlanta are now being targeted themselves by AT&T, which is offering $3,000 for information leading to their arrest. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that in one recent three-day stretch, nearly 7,000 customers and two schools lost land line phone service. The FBI has said in the past that the rising theft of the metal is threatening critical infrastructure by targeting electrical substations, cellular towers, telephone land lines, railroads, water wells, construction sites, and vacant homes for lucrative profits."

And yet you don't just post here, you maintain several accounts so that you can continue to post your drivel when your karma gets so low one is blocked from posting. Which says a lot more about you than it does about the site...

Here in South Africa copper wire has been a country wide problem, some areas being hit time and again 1 week after the lines have been restored.
I definitely agree that fiber is the way to go, especially once you've replaced the same line more than 6 times....

Problem is that they go after the electricity cables too, and those can't be replaced with fiber.
Occasionally they end up self fried, but it doesn't seem to be a long term deterrent.

Perhaps improving the job market and your nations distribution of wealth might help. People go to extremes when they cannot afford the basics of life. If your kids needed to eat you too would risk toasting yourself with an electrical line.

One of the reasons newer A/C condensers have signs like "NO COPPER INSIDE" is exactly because of this.

The reason for this happening? Copper is in areas that have no guards, alarms, curious onlookers. Then it is just one insulation-burning step away from a recycler and cash per pound.

The only real solution is to start forcing recyclers to have a chain of custody, similar to what pawnshops have when someone tries to sell/pawn something. No "well, I got this copper from an old remodel I just did" BS which serves now. Require a valid ID for sale with valid contact info. Some recyclers do their homework with this, but there are always others who don't.

That's the problem. When the scrap dealers will accept parking meters and in one case, the pendulum from a hundred-year-old clock, then the problem isn't the meth-head looking for a fix. A reputable place will require ID and call the place. Some of the places here provide coffee, a tent, and insulation strippers.

It happens during construction and remodeling too, as often security guards aren't hired to protect empty buildings.

A few years ago the San Jose police had a nice sting. They put up actual paper fliers around offering to buy copper, and then set up a recycling center store front. When word got out that they'd buy anything, people actually showed up with stolen cars, drugs, guns, and even a guy selling bombs.

I think that is exactly a tool that might need to be used more, although it takes resources and manpower from an already strained system (and property crimes are low on the list in general) -- more sting operations like that. Perhaps even a recycling center that is persistant, but is able to keep tabs on the perps just for evidence reasons.

A long term sting like that would do three things -- make the thieves doing that leery of recycling centers in general, throw a number in prison, and perhaps help find o

Maybe I'm being a fool here but... they wouldn't steal copper if there weren't corrupt metal buyers out there. I mean, why the heck would a scrap yard accept X feet of copper wire if he shows up in his pickup? For all the press on this issue (and there's a lot of it here in Detroit), there's never any real discussion of fining or doing ANYTHING to discourage the metal buyers from accepting obviously stolen materials. Until such steps are taken (i.e. real penalties for accepting stolen cable, pipes, etc), th

Rolling up to the scrap yard is with some old knob and tube copper wiring would seem legit...Rolling up to the scrap yard with some newish 250 pair aerial phone wire with AT&T logo's on the side and all does not.

I scrap things all the time in my auto hobby. I think its kinda easy to spot the things that may be stolen.. Like where does a guy with meth rash and no teeth come across 7 good looking saws-alled off catalitic converters? Or car batteries with the terminals just ripped off? Or radiators that ar

Of course ne'er-do-wells have resorted to stealing copper wire, ever since The Man made melting down pennies a federal crime [usmint.gov]. US pennies and nickels are technically worth more as metal than their face value. (I can't source it but I recall reading that before the new regulation was made a company was actually gearing up to enter the penny-melting business until the feds put the kibosh on it.)

Yep, the head ends and such aren't so easy to sell but copper is copper. Once it's been stripped you have a hard time telling where it's come from, and there's plenty who don't care where it came from as well.

Hmm..how about some type of official licensing required to sell scrap copper and/or other metals.

I'd have to guess paying an annual fee, and having to go "on record" would deter some of the average thieves?

I'm generally against any extra govt. intervention, rules or licensing...but this actually seems like it might server an appropriate function. I mean, the do monitor pawn shops, why not have some type of system that is somewhat analogous to what they do to pawn shops to help prevent stolen goods from be

Well, typically people who don't think they should have to follow the rules ruin it for everyone who does. I expect it to be true for everything eventually.Either nobody will be able to do it profitably, except mega corps who will just steal from each other, or everyone will have to undergo TSAesque scrutiny.

All you do is what they do at the pawn shop, take your ID information. Anyone worried about copper theft should be having the insulation custom-printed. Sorry, but there it is. Of course, once it's been burned off, you're not going to know jack without some very expensive metallurgical work.

OK, you're clearly just trolling at this point, but I'll respond - how about you don't call them anything personally, and simply provide clear and civil arguments against their viewpoints, for the benefit of everyone reading the thread, and, perhaps, even the "idiots" themselves?

You're the idiot, you didn't even read the parent's post. Is reading comprehension a problem for you? Come on, troll harder.

Nowhere is the parent suggesting that tearing down other people's houses is legal. He's suggesting that criminals don't give two shits about the law. Apparently you can't read between the lines, idiot.

By the way, you are supposed to capitalize the first letter of every sentence, and "I" is spelled with a capital I. I know it's really hard to reach the shift key with your fat, hot

You'd think so wouldn't you? Back about 2 years ago, some idiots tried stealing copper elec. lines, and blew out a 220k kv transformer about 2 blocks from my house. No smoking shoes. That left a city of ~30,000 people without power for nearly a day and a half.

You'd think so wouldn't you? Back about 2 years ago, some idiots tried stealing copper elec. lines, and blew out a 220k kv transformer about 2 blocks from my house. No smoking shoes. That left a city of ~30,000 people without power for nearly a day and a half.

It took them a day and a half to replace a transformer serving 15,000 customers? That doesn't say much good about the power company. Unless the police delayed them for most of that time "investigating".

Those transmission level power transformers take up half a flatbed, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's going to require some very heavy equipment to install, and they may have to ship the replacement some distance. It's not like a lineman with a pickup truck is going to be able to pick one up from the local depot.

In Transylvania during the rule of Dracula, robbery and theft became very rare. Not because the penalty was death, the penalty was the thief (and the fence, and the guard on duty at the time and probably the families of those men) publicly tortured to death and the staked out along the road to rot and be eaten by buzzards.

I don't understand your statement. Murder is often a crime of passion, even with a 100% conviction and execution rate, murder would still happen occasionally. The death penalty does not ac

The point of it is that the thieves are going after low voltage stuff because there's much less risk. The overhead transmission wires are known by basically everybody to be dangerous to screw around with. Phone lines do carry enough power to fry a person, but the situation is pretty specific, you pretty much have to be taking a bath and dump the phone in before it's a problem.

And the risk to reward ratio for copper is still rather low. Copper isn't gold people, it would be better to just get a bunch of pre-1982 pennies and melt them down if you wanted cheap, illegal copper.

Yes, but those are phone wires, not power distribution wires. (The difference lies in both the voltage and the current.) All telcos not already done are in the process of replacing as much copper as possible with fiber, starting with the biggest markets and working their way down. A fiber cut is a PITA to repair but it's many times easier than splicing a fat bundle of pairs of copper.

A bundle of fibers cut is still a pain to replace. Even more than copper. But there is no reason for people to steal fiber, so all the cuts will end up being either accidental or vandalism with intent to steal until the news gets out that the big fat cables aren't copper any more.

No, you're trying to assert you used more specific words than you actually did. There's a difference. If I was cherry picking your words, I would have omitted some of them, instead of quoting them verbatim.

Either way, pedantry on Slashdot isn't exactly something to get excited about. If I didn't do it, someone else would have.:-P

I'd be a bit skeptical of those photos personally. For one thing, the bodies wouldn't likely still be lying like that next to the source of the power and definitely not neatly either. Even with just household currents you often times get folks being thrown back when their body convulses in what is essentially a massive seizure. I know of at least one case where an apprentice electrician got shocked, then died promptly of a head injury sustained when he was thrown off his ladder.

But fiber optic transmits information better. And information is power...

Power requires a transformer to be useful. Information can only be transformed into power by human beings....and humans are the most inefficient transformers. Therefore, electrical wires transmit a more effective form of power than optic fiber. /pedantic_argument

If there were no copper left then they would stop. Until then, if the risk is virtually nil, even if you have to cut 10 lines to find one copper one it will still be worth it. If there was a high enough chance of getting caught, then increasing the proportion of fiber would eventually be a deterrent. So the only real solution is some method of prevention or prosecution.

How about an anti-theft system that, when it detects tampering, it disconnects the communication equipment and throws on 10,000 volts?

Great. When you figure out how to deliver 120 Volts AC over fiber, get back to me. (I agree, the phone infrastructure should be replaced with fiber.)

My wife's family owns a house in Freetown, Sierra Leone. They've replaced the fricking buried rubber water line providing water to the house 3 times, because thieves keep digging it up and stealing it. It ain't just copper that's a problem...

My wife's friends were shipping several dozen bicycles to Africa, until some Mexicans came by and threw them all into the back of a truck. They got arrested when they came back for more, but by then they had already sold the bikes as scrap metal for a whopping payoff of $170 and they had already been ground up for scrap! Now seriously, if you are a scrap metal dealer and somebody wants to sell you a load of perfectly functional bikes for a few bucks a piece, wouldn't you be at least a little bit suspicious?

People are still stealing it like crazy. Here's [goo.gl] a link for a Google search on the phrase "copper wire stolen" in the last two weeks. I know there are repeats but 36,400 results is still a lot.

But I'm seeing a trend in policing: Personal crime (armed robbery, assault, murder) is given much higher priority than property crime.

The trend has been going on for a while. I was on a trial where a key part of the jury interview was asking about peoples' interactions with law enforcement. I think a bit less than 20 people had experienced property crime (mostly car break-ins and a few burglaries) and one person had experienced personal crime (there could have been more, several people did the interview privately). The only crime where someone was caught for it was the personal crime (a mugging where a suspect was found later that night).